Nothing much more than agreement and a link.

This also gets me thinking about the use of third party frameworks like NHibernate, Lucene, etc in general. I’ll just say it, my experience is that “Microsoft” developers are biased towards Microsoft products. Ok, now that I write that I feel like I just said black is the new black. I’ll try to explain and hope I find a point in here somewhere.

[When I say “MS” developer, all I’m referring to is a developer who works primarily on microsoft technology, that’s all. I’m referring to myself currently.]

I’ve found that when optimization issues arise with open source frameworks, like NHibernate, that “MS” developers start pointing fingers. “NHibernate’s broken”, “NHibernate is doing this”. I have yet to run into a case where these haven’t been programming issues on our side. Typically they’re optimization issues that just need to be solved.

Now, take the same scenario and stick in a MS framework like ADO. The same developers who were all over the open source framework will just start optimizing and solving. There’s no “ADO’s broken” or “ADO deleted our data” etc.

I like to say that I’m technology agnostic but clearly we all have our biases. I just think the open source guys generally get a bum-rap from the ms developers. Maybe it’s deserved? I have no idea but my experience tells me no. All frameworks should be held to the coals when it’s their domain.

I’m in Toronto today and stopped into a Chapters hoping to grab a copy of Vonnegut’s God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater. I asked for assistance as there were literally none on the shelf. The chapters guy checked the computer which said there should be some. He wandered off and returned to tell me that all copies are behind the information desk as they’ve become hot items for theft. Huh? How does that work?

So if you’re in chapters and can’t find your Vonnegut fix on the shelf, make sure you ask. I’m still confused.

Mark’s got a piece he wrote available here. I often think of some of these fringe workstyles that I’m currently involved in as less of a destination than a protest of sorts. A lot of people are clearly not happy with the way companies are being operated. They may, or may not, have voiced that opinion but ultimately they’ve decided to leave and create their own community.

I fall into that category and I’m disappointed in myself because in a lot of ways that’s the easy way out. I left a toxic environment instead of sticking it out and helping to repair it. It’s the same reason two tiered school systems are a challenge. If all the passionate, concerned parent’s are pulling their children out of public schools and placing them into private ones then who’s fixing the public system?

There are a lot of people working independently these days. I don’t think the answer is that corporations will no longer exist and we’ll all be freelancers. I think the longterm answer is that companies will learn from what we’re doing and right themselves. At some point the smart companies will have to start asking themselves what they need to do to attract these people back or keep the ones that will otherwise leave in the near future. Or they could just phone us and we’ll tell them?

I was about to write something about using boolean parameters in methods when designing a framework. Luckliy most of what I would say is here, in the post and the comments. As well, msdn kinda-sorta touches on it here.

In general, boolean parameters used in this fashion in a framework API are poor design and should be refactored.

I’ve been doing some very rough testing of Lucene .NET and it’s an impressive framework. I’m able to index all text documents(153) on my drive in a little over 5 seconds. That’s indexing the entire contents of those text files!

Subsequent searches of the resulting index take about a tenth of a second. Technically, these aren’t valuable benchmarks as I’m just running in debug mode on a VMWare windows image with only 500 MB ram designated.

I’m still impressed.

I’ve heard of, but had yet to get around to taking beagle for a walk.

“Beagle is a search system for Linux and other modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.”

Wow, you can colour me impressed. That little puppy indexes everything, including my IM conversations and my web browsing history. The mac crowd has spotlight but I certainly haven’t seen anything this slick on windows. Unless of course you’re brave enough to hand over the keys to the boys at google.

The searching and indexing in beagle is built on Lucene. We’re assessing using the .net port on a current project.

A great quote of Donald Knuth‘s is “Early optimization is the root of much evil.” I’m with Donnie. Don’t solve problems you don’t yet have because in doing so you may create worse problems than the ones you didn’t have to start with. Wow, does that make any sense?

In an interview today I was shocked to hear Heather Mallick say “when Kurt Vonnegut died…”. I had no clue and if you’re in the same boat, it’s true. Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week on April 11th, 2007.

Ever since I read my first Vonnegut I’ve had an affliction. Whenever I look for a book to read, I have to force myself to take a break and read something other than Vonnegut. I have yet to read all his books, if you’re interested, two of my personal favourites are Sirens of Titan  and Bluebeard.
So it goes.

I’ve always been in agreement on Joel’s stance on developer productivity in relation to private offices. It’s yet another reason I love our model, we all work in private offices. When Joel designed their new office he went to town and private offices were only part of the story.

As with most things in corporate culture, I do my best to at least spend some time contemplating why something I disagree with exists. For example, cubicles. If you believe that, for the most part, the world’s filled with people who are trying their best and have decent intentions, then there must be a reason offices are filled with cubicles. Or maybe Joel and his ilk are the only one’s who’ve taken the time to make something unique happen?

Well in this case I think Joel’s learned the hard way why cubicles exist and it’s pretty interesting. Ok, technically it’s boring tax stuff but it’s interesting to see an idea that makes sense, to me at least, in theory be put into practice and then run headlong into financial reality. If you’re a CFO at a tech company then you may want to bookmark Joel’s post. One thing to note is that if not for their own success and growth this problem wouldn’t exist and they’d still be sitting cozy in their bionic offices.

Joel’s now looking for middle ground in the form of moveable walls. Be careful man, I’ve had movable walls before and there was little, to no, noticeable difference between them and a cube.